Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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The Key to Snapchat’s Profitability: It’s Dirt Cheap to Run
Note: this article was published in Wired. Check out my handy service storage and bandwidth calculator. Ever since Snapchat turned down a $3 billion all-cash offer from Facebook this past November, there’s been no shortage of discussion about it and the rest of its photo-sharing-and-messaging service cohort, including WhatsApp, Kik, Japan-based LINE, China-based WeChat, and Korea-based Kakao […]
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Service storage and bandwidth cost calculator
This page allows you to simulate the costs of storage and bandwith for a simple web service like Facebook or Snapchat. For more info on why this might be interesting, please read my post about infrastructure in ephemeral networks. The defaults are based on data for Facebook based on a number of publicly available data. […]
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Your password management strategy stinks: Here’s why
We’ve used passwords since the beginning of computing. But back then you only had to remember one password—a single account let you access all the programs on one computer. You were unlikely to need to get into more than one of those giant machines! As the number of devices and applications we use has exploded, […]
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Colours in movie posters since 1914
Edit: Buy the movie poster hues (1914-2012) poster A couple of weeks ago, I was having brunch with Kim-Mai Cutler — we were discussing the new startup I’m building in the enterprise space (if you’re a ui/ux person or awesome engineer looking for something fun to do, drop me a line!) — and I mentioned […]
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Update / Solution for broken Android calendar syncing
In my last post, I described how Android’s calendar syncing was broken for me. I noticed that my calendar on my phone was out of date, and when I manually refreshed, I’d get a force-close error. After downloading the Android source, figuring out how to build, and playing with it on the emulator and my […]
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Android calendar syncing is broken for me!
For the past couple of weeks, (shortly after my nexus s upgraded itself to ICS), the calendar on my phone has not been syncing with Google. This has required me to use the calendar website on my phone, which is not a pleasant experience at all. So today, I hooked my phone up to my […]
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Partychat — migrating from Google App Engine to EC2
I’m Vijay Pandurangan, and I’ve been working with some other super talented folks to help maintain the partychat code, and help pay for its services. Because of the latter, I was especially motivated to keep Partychat’s costs under control! Recently, Google App Engine made some substantial pricing changes. This affected a lot of people, but […]
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Migrated Partychat rooms and Google Apps domains
Due to App Engine cost changes, I’ve been working with the partychat folks to migrate our services to a new domain (new rooms are channel@im.partych.at). We’re seeing a lot of people who are using accounts on Google Apps domains having difficulty connecting to the new Partychat services. Simple solutions If you are using a Google […]
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Why Eclipse’s “Check for Updates” is horribly slow (and how to fix it)
I recently installed Eclipse Indigo. I wanted to add a few plugins to it, so I tried to use the UI to check for new updates and install some new packages. I let it run for a while, and after about 45 minutes, it looked to be about 20% done. Eventually, it displayed a few […]
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Attaching a physical (raw) disk to VMWare Fusion 4 without BootCamp
I wanted to boot and run my Linux installation from a physical disk inside Mac OS X. There’s no easy guide for this on the web; most want you to use a vmware tool that existed in previous versions in /Library/Application Support/VM* but that file didn’t exist for me. I think the new VMWare Fusion […]
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